Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/net/regarding-community-content-archiving/td-p/13198106

by nsoonhui • 2 years ago

250 170 2 years ago

forums.autodesk.com

Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has been false since many years. Most companies couldn't care less about keeping the wealth information they've accumulated accessible.

I remember a few years ago TI got bored with updating their cpuwiki, and deleted the whole this - which stings to this day. The internet is still full of links to it to solve crucial issues, only to be greeted with a disappointing error message.

brutal_chaos_• 2 years ago

Tbf, if you're lucky, there is web.archive.org and others like it, but yes, situations like those are common and disappointing.

Roark66• 2 years ago

It has became very obvious how reliant we are on Archive.org last time they had an extended outage (remember?, they got hacked,then they couldn't bring the system back up for weeks and weeks). Huge amounts of reference material suddenly dissappeared.

Personally I think it is a huge error we don't force archive.org to allow others to mirror their data easily.

johnfernow2• 2 years ago

Right, archive.org is very useful if you have a URL, but if you're searching for a question that was answered in a forum, and that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in search results, then it's effectively undiscoverable as far as I'm aware.

It amazes me how companies will have free volunteers help people to use their (often expensive) paid subscription products, and then delete all that info those volunteers wrote up. Don't they want people to use their products?! They're less likely to renew their subscription if they struggle or are unable to use the product for their particular use case.

Unaffiliated forums not ran by the company are better in that the company can't decide to just delete all old posts one day (and while the owner could, certain types of unaffiliated forums are usually a bit easier to clone and republish.) The downside is you don't get assistance from people who work for that company, but often you rarely get that in official forums. The usual reason to use official forums is just that they have significantly more users asking and answering questions than unofficial ones.

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

I think “the internet doesn’t forget” was not originally intended that way. It is a reminder that it is hard to reliably delete something from the internet. Unrelated to this auto desk issue.

The internet does forget in the sense that stuff goes missing. Just, only stuff that you don’t want to go missing!

Sanzig• 2 years ago

It's essentially a law of the internet. Well-researched website on a niche topic written in the 00s? Lost forever. Your edgelord blog from when you were a teenager? Backed up in triplicate.

matt3210• 2 years ago

It’s in the AI model now no worries

256_• 2 years ago

I feel like there should a law about this, but I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe companies should have to at least give a warning before they do it, so Archive Team (or the likes of them) can go into panic mode and archive everything before it gets deleted.

samtho• 2 years ago

I don’t think the reaction to everything we dislike should be “let’s make it illegal” because you’re going to end up with unintended harms. If companies are forced to retain public information against their will, many will simply opt not to have a public forum.

If anything, governments should be proactively funding organizations that archive content and governments can archive content of significant cultural or historical value like the library of congress does for physical media.

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

I don’t think there should be a law requiring companies to keep a forum up. But perhaps it would be nice if we could have a customer protection based requirement to have some sort of customer support, along with acknowledgement that a customer support forum that could go away at any moment doesn’t satisfy that requirement (so either include better customer service or take steps to preserve the community).

I mean we wouldn’t want companies to fall afoul of some law because they had to take their forums down due to some privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third party software they used for the server went out of business.

hombre_fatal• 2 years ago

That's insane overreach.

The web archive already works from the mode that anything can disappear at any time. Anyone who would rush to archive it if it were going offline could have archived it any time over the last N years.

Websites getting shut down no matter the reason is just a part of life that we need to accept. Laws can't address the underlying churn of time. Forums should be easy come easy go, not open you up to litigation if you shut down your own site too quickly. Cmon.

jraph3• 2 years ago

Unfortunately the "internet doesn't forget" statement has been false since many years

As a sibling comment says, I think such sentences have meant "you can't rely on the internet to forget". Of course the reverse is also true: "you can't rely on the internet to remember".

In short: don't write things you could regret, but make backups.

frereubu• 2 years ago

Reminds me tangentially of the saying attributed to Mohammed - "Trust in God. But tie your camel first."

nsoonhui3• 2 years ago

Fun fact: the official announcement of this policy (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/commu...) is not even reachable via a Google search.

lelandfe• 2 years ago

Possibly just hadn't been indexed yet, looks fine:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fforums....

darth_avocado• 2 years ago

We encourage you to create a new thread about the same topic. It will help maintain the conversation while also resurfacing it on our boards to continue the conversation.

Ohh god. Always surprises me how people building stuff for the internet completely dont understand the internet.

numpad02• 2 years ago

You're wrong. We're wrong. Sanctioning behaviors idiots do as official makes things more approachable. It doesn't matter that not doing things elitist ways wreck productivity because output quantity nor quality no longer matter but how strongly one is aligned with zeitgeist do as if we're living in a Soviet Russian shoestring factory. It sucks.

geekodour• 2 years ago

algolia has done the same for their discourse forum, moved everything to discord and removed all old posts.

Upon asking this was a response from the team: "The Discourse content is no longer available. Much of it was 5+ years old and no longer reflected current SDKs and APIs. We're glad to help you here."

https://ibb.co/3htkxjv https://discord.com/channels/1171089640443367494/12783186879...

people were unhappy obviously. I really don't understand this decision by them.

benatkin4• 2 years ago

That's pretty messed up. Maybe they don't deserve the honor of being HN's search engine anymore.

spockz• 2 years ago

Isn’t there a fancy LLM ai out there that is suited to ingesting a local knowledge base and create excerpts with links to the original source?

reddalo2• 2 years ago

Also, why would anyone want to use Discord as a forum? It's horrible, not easily searchable, and you need a proprietary app. Nothing good about it.

Tomte• 2 years ago

You can use your web browser, as well.

CSMastermind• 2 years ago

I'm shocked so many companies use Discord for official purposes.

oblio• 2 years ago

You can just use the website.

Edit: It's <<Discourse>>, not <<Discord>>.

Edit 2: Oh, they moved from Discourse to Discord :-)) That is just messed up.

Kiro• 2 years ago

I definitely understand it. I have some really old blog posts with tutorials for a deprecated version of my software and I get a lot of people complaining about things not working based on those. I've had to add disclaimers to the most popular ones.

vachina• 2 years ago

Removing those content will make user experience worse and make AutoDesk harder to use (or learn on your own). Just let it (autodesk) die.

baq2• 2 years ago

Show me a tool that’s more entrenched and for good reasons than autodesk’s CAD… I’ll accept Photoshop, but can not think of anything else

seb1204• 2 years ago

I am in two minds. All discussion about old old AutoCAD versions is more clutter than value. But discussions about profiles or lisp routines are not.

acyou2• 2 years ago

Archiving is probably a more accurate description, the content is likely still there somewhere but can no longer be adversarially web crawled.

nsoonhui3• 2 years ago

No, deletion is the accurate description. Some links that are still available on Google search ( eg: try this query "https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+unit+test++civil+3d" and look for the posts that are> 10 year old) are no longer accessible; when you click on them you will be directed to the main forum page.

jacobgkau4• 2 years ago

I think they were insinuating, with no basis, that Autodesk is for some reason keeping the removed posts in their own offline/intranet backup. They could've also been thrown off by the PR speak the Autodesk employee who announced this used, in which they called it "archiving" but also said "we cannot keep the content" (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/community-announcements/commu...).

acyou2• 2 years ago

Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it isn't still there somewhere.

If you are looking for something and it isn't where you last found it, you usually wouldn't assume it's "gone".

Yeah, maybe for you it's as good as deleted. But I suspect Autodesk retained 100% of this data for subsequent machine learning application. And I think for you to say it's deleted, how are you going to prove there are no copies?

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

The user's own .sig says it all: "Everything will work just as you expect it to, unless your expectations are incorrect."

It's Autodesk, a company of skunks. You knew who they were when you signed up with them and gave them money. They did just what anyone who was paying attention would have expected of them.

chris_wot2• 2 years ago

Oh god, Autodesk. I tried to see if I could pay for education support because Fusion 360 account setup is unbelievably buggy, but no cigar.

They have the worst installer and registration process in all of history. I really wish we could find an alternative - even willing to pay!

Foobar8568• 2 years ago

My kid wanted to learn 3d modeling, she is in middle school, and under than 12, according to their licensing, no luck as the kid needs to be over 14.

Support was pointless ("education license is not for commercial use" ). Off we went on blender.

phoronixrly• 2 years ago

Good choice!

anal_reactor3• 2 years ago

Back in the day I heard an argument "Photshop and 3DS MAX are so easy to pirate because the companies want the kids to learn these tools, so that later as adult professionals they'll pay license for using them", but if that's no longer true, then good riddance

Onawa• 2 years ago

OnShape has replaced Fusion360 for most of my needs, and it's free for personal use.

baq2• 2 years ago

Just the other day I created a fusion 360 account which also seems free for personal use? The CAD space is quite confusing

krelas• 2 years ago

I’ve been going through the same thing. Take a look at Onshape, it’s also free for education. I haven’t had a chance to check it out myself yet but I hear good things.

epa• 2 years ago

Should be already archived by archive.org?

johnfernow2• 2 years ago

Sure, but you can't search for the forum pages on archive.org as far as I'm aware (or at least as easily as searching on Autodesk's website or Google/Bing/etc.) For the time being, old forum posts will likely still show up in search engine search results, and you can take those URLs and look them up on archive.org.

Eventually though they'll likely no longer show up whenever the search engine's crawlers revisit and it's a redirect, in which case the pages are undiscoverable.

neilv• 2 years ago

Is this motivated by the value of the text (for internal use, or selling it), or about to launch some new "AI-powered" support thing, or by the headache of dealing with data scrapers pounding their servers, or something else?

simonw2• 2 years ago

Urgh, cultural vandalism.

The challenge here is that there are people out there who just do not understand the inherent value of this kind of old content. If any company exists for long enough eventually some of those people will cycle into positions of decision-making authority where they get to "save costs" or "clean things up" by delete-hammering some invaluable artifact like this one.

The correct way to handle this is to add a BIG banner on top of older content like this warning "This post is from 12 years ago, and may no longer reflect the most recent version of our software".

Flattening a bunch of dynamic pages to static HTML can also be useful, if the concern is maintaining old forum software.

SuperNinKenDo• 2 years ago

It's not that they don't understand, it's that they don't care, more often than not. Sadly there has been a societal shift in my view that will be hard to reverse, just think of Boeing as an extreme example. We've created incentive structures that not only reward short-sighted decision making, but also created social norms that punish people who try to push for long-term goals or things that are not in one's immediate self-interest. Corporate sees you as a headache for not thinking about nothing but line going up, and your peers will deride you as a fool for not "getting it" and giving up like they have.

anal_reactor3• 2 years ago

Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead

hulitu• 2 years ago

Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead

Because it is mostly not knowledge, but tips to make their software work.

bragr• 2 years ago

When Oracle bought Sun/Solaris, they took down the public Solaris forums which made my job working with illumos forks very difficult without all the years relevant Solaris 10 questions and answers. In that case, it was a naked attempt to force people to license the then new Solaris 11.

Suppafly2• 2 years ago

Oracle is anti-consumer in a ton of ways, I'm not sure why they have so much money to be able to buy and ruin so many other things.

kjs3• 2 years ago

This isn't about cost reduction. It's about eliminating any assistance for people who want to continue to use old versions of the software. Adobe is in the cloud/subscription business now, and it wants to make life for people holding on to their local, licensed copies as difficult as possible.

jxramos• 2 years ago

this seems true and explains my inability to locate the plugin tooling for the latest version of Acrobat to develop some local extensions. My next move was to contact Adobe and ask directly where the corresponding SDK is to be downloaded for the latest local version of Acrobat. Sometimes companies give you some internal link that you can't find publicly or can't navigate to from the present version of their website.

michaelcampbell• 2 years ago

Indeed; if this was a profit and not a cost, there's no way they'd've gotten rid of it.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

Always Be Archiving. Never trust the platform.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

badlibrarian• 2 years ago

Spend half an hour perusing that site and you'll truly see the pathetic state of preservation on the web. Outdated information, an endless list of failed projects... it's a self-referential call to action that documents our collective inaction.

fasa99• 2 years ago

I'm a big archive team fan but gotta go with the ABC acronym such as "always be collecting" or "always be capturing"

criddell2• 2 years ago

How are these old posts invaluable? Do you think a paywall would have generated enough revenue to pay for serving them? If nobody is willing to pay for access, doesn’t that mean they are in fact not valuable at all?

bdndndndbve• 2 years ago

Such an insane paperclip optimizing way of thinking. The marginal cost to serve static content is very low as well - if they really didn't want to pay anything they could give it to a third party.

ToucanLoucan4• 2 years ago

Autodesk made almost 5 billion dollars in 2023. You can host a vBulletin forum with incredibly high traffic for a couple thousand a year. Stop making excuses for shitty companies.

simonw2• 2 years ago

A paywall would make them useless, because you wouldn't be able to find them using Google.

anitil• 2 years ago

As an example, when I used to work in embedded development I'd come across some weird undocumented behaviour of a peripheral in a device. Inevitably there'd be a post on a manufacturer-hosted forum where someone else had hit and hopefully solved the same thing. To me at the time these were very valuable, but the actual information was created by the community rather than the manufacturer.

As to who would pay for it, that's a tough one - my employer wasn't willing to. I suppose it acts as a commons

bsder• 2 years ago

Urgh, cultural vandalism.

This was probably intentional. Those posts are no longer available to feed an AI. Now only Autodesk has access to those posts.

People need to understand that the free ride is over. If you aren't hosting or archiving, it's going to disappear.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

Ye I hate this. I work with a processor that TI manufactures and a huge part of the "eco system" was referring to a now defunct forum and wiki. It is a mess. At some point they just deleted it and replaced it with nothing. Links to download of tools and libs are broken. And support don't have them. I was just lucky I found them on arhive.org ...

ghaff5• 2 years ago

To give another perspective, from a company perspective, companies are mostly not really in the business of providing an archive. And if you provide a bunch of outdated information--banners flagging it as such or otherwise--you're mostly not doing most people any favors when they encounter that info when doing a search. Most companies pretty aggressively remove info more than a year old or whatever.

WalterBright• 2 years ago

When I build a Javascript compiler, it used a lot of ActiveX interfaces. In the code that used a particular interface, I'd include a link to the Microsoft documentation on it.

One day, all those links went to dead ends.

iJohnDoe• 2 years ago

According to some sources, this is what happened to Google Search.

Maakuth2• 2 years ago

ArchiveTeam (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/) fairly routinely makes archival blitzes on dying forums. If there's any forewarning of such on a forum you frequent, let them know.

ykonstant• 2 years ago

If only they were around when my old hangout, www.wota.com, was alive :(

mmooss• 2 years ago

How does the public access ArchiveTeam's archives?

Maakuth2• 2 years ago

They send everything to archive.org and the data is eventually included in the Wayback Machine.

theoa• 2 years ago

John Walker the founder would grieve as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)

He was a digital hoarder sharer. See:

https://fourmilab.ch/

cowboylowrez• 2 years ago

just nabbed his midi to csv gadgets! seems like an awesome guy!

deckar013• 2 years ago

It needed curation pretty bad. There is no shortage of people who ask and answer questions. The relevant knowledge will resurface as needed. I just hope they manage outdated information better in the future.

rossng• 2 years ago

Does Autodesk have any remaining users that actually _enjoy_ being their customer? Their CAD software is unstable and painful (just try installing it...); architects resent their stewardship of Revit[1] and so on.

This seems like an existential risk to the company if something better comes along. Sure, they have massive lock-in, but these things don't last forever. Remember when we all thought that Microsoft Office file formats guaranteed an eternal monopoly?

[1] https://the-nordic-letter.com/

sschueller• 2 years ago

Fusion 360 is getting worse and costs more every year. Now they just emailed that the early renewal discount will also no longer be available.

Sadly FreeCAD is just not there where it needs to be to be a good alternative.

deckar013• 2 years ago

Fusion turned a corner recently imo. They added the ability to reference driven dimensions in formulas, which makes fully parametric designs trivial. I seem to never get hung calculations or crashes anymore.

deskr• 2 years ago

I switched to FreeCAD 2-3 years ago. It suits me just fine and I'm so glad I can store my project in a local folder. I also don't have to worry Fusion360 taking any more features away or locking me out. I also don't have to beg them to renew my licence every year.

FreeCAD has improved a lot recently.

MangoJelly has also done massive work creating thorough video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yh_S31R9g&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...

galleywest200• 2 years ago

I tried FreeCAD earlier this year but I nearly pulled my hair out trying to move a hole in a design after the hole was created. This is a much easier task in Autodesk. I am not sure I am a huge fan of the UI design choices that FreeCAD has made.

throw_m239339• 2 years ago

Businesses have pipelines entirely relying on Autodesk tools & formats.

but these things don't last forever. Remember when we all thought that Microsoft Office file formats guaranteed an eternal monopoly?

It will last long enough for Autodesk. The real issue being why Autodesk was allowed to basically buy most of its main competitors in the 3D/CAD authoring tool space without any push back from government agencies.

jlarocco• 2 years ago

The real issue being why Autodesk was allowed to basically buy most of its main competitors in the 3D/CAD authoring tool space without any push back from government agencies.

That's not even remotely true. There's Dassault/Catia, Siemens/NX, PTC/Creo, and probably a dozen (or more) niche competitors.

The real problem is massive vendor lock-in. Each CAD company goes out of their way to have crappy interop with the others.

quickthrowman• 2 years ago

Software for the construction industry is uniformly terrible, Autodesk and Trimble are the big players and I’d be grateful if someone disrupted them.

There is a small amount of good construction software, Procore (project and document management) and Bluebeam (amazing pdf editor) are wonderful tools but the estimating software I use by Trimble is awful. Inconsistent UI, they use their own custom GUI elements instead of the built in Windows GUI elements, unclear interfaces, every UI/UX crime is present in it.

Autodesk isn’t going anywhere tho, basically every architect/engineer uses it (in commercial construction).

johnyoder• 2 years ago

If you are a GC looking for an alternative project management software that is easy to use, modern, and fairly priced, consider https://constructable.ai (full transparency, I'm one of the co-founders).

Everything being said about existing software in this post very much resonates with what we learned talking to hundreds of GCs. We want to change this.

harrall• 2 years ago

If you think Autodesk is bad, try their competition.

Paid competiting software from companies like Dassault are even more locked down and free software alternatives don’t even come close in feature parity.

Autodesk can do this because it’s been 40 years, a lot of people have tried, and somehow they all manage to make something worse.

lmpdev• 2 years ago

I find Rhino3D to be a pretty good antithesis to AutoDesk.

The company behind it is employee owned and been around since the ‘90s.

Subscription-free, single payment, and they actually support older versions of their software.

One nice part of their license is if you buy the student version, there is no restriction on you continuing to use that license commercially, in perpetuity.

fuzzfactor• 2 years ago

Has anybody identified the decision-maker responsible?

Hopefully it's only a single individual who is now confirmed to be completely unsuitable for any future decision-making whatsoever.

Without doing as much of a root-cause analysis as possible, people will not even be aware where the deficiency arose and there may be no protection going forward from such below-average performance.

Decision-making is not for just anybody, I think it's obvious if you don't nip faultiness in the bud it could get even worse and spread to other companies.

Even some companies which were high-integrity to begin with, as we have seen.

crtified2• 2 years ago

The internet, or dare I say it, Information Technology itself, has not yet come to proper terms with Time Context as an implicit aspect of data. Much information is not static, but rather is a growing or changing development from year-to-year.

Using today's generic tools to search for digital information relevant to a specific version or time period of anything is very ad-hoc, hit-and-miss. And we're only a mere few decades in. I think the time context of data is going to become increasingly important and valuable.

ghaff5• 2 years ago

Having been involved in creating content and deciding whether it should be retired or not, it really isn't about the money. Product docs can be locked to versions and archived pretty well; most sensible people understand the docs for 1.0 may not apply to version 3.0. But there are a ton of things on a company website that don't really apply to the here and now and will be increasingly out of date. And, if you just leave everything accessible forever, it pollutes the current information.

I get that some people prefer everything is just left online but it gets harder and harder for all the folks who just want info that's fairly current.

gmueckl• 2 years ago

You can explicitly move old content to an archive and put big banners on it that it doesn't reflect current information. MS does an OK job of making it obvious that you're looking at documentation for an older product, for example.

double0jimb0• 2 years ago

Autodesk deserves to be poster child for enshitification.

A few weeks ago I found a video that allowed me to work around a bug in Inventor 2025 that has existed for 20 years… the video was a grainy screen capture from a Windows 97 machine!

And each year I pay more for a product that gets worse.

sota_pop5• 2 years ago

As someone who used Revit for 5 years before moving to develop and maintain custom Revit API apps full-time, I have many horror stories I could share (feel free to AMA). I can say that the latest version of Revit (R2025) is largely a single-threaded application, and has only just upgraded their back-end from .Net Framework 4.8.1 to .Net8.0. The company continuously and openly takes breathtakingly blatant advantage of their user base and is at worst adversarial to their users. The software captures and exchanges a surprising amount of data during usage (to the point that Revit itself is hard to distinguish between malware by network cybersec software). Autodesk is a walking-talking timebomb of an antitrust suit waiting to happen. With that said, Revit does a lot of things well and there are no realistic alternatives. Personally, I have always found community responses on forums very helpful while autodesk support has ranged from helpful, to useless, to simultaneously counter-productive and insulting. Jeremy Tammik (officially affiliated with Autodesk these days) and his “The Building Coder Blog” is a very nice reference for Revit API and he is somehow EVERYWHERE on the forums.

edit: the open letter posted here by another user does a very good job detailing many broad issues (with Revit in particular); every point it makes is accurate in my experience.

sota_pop5• 2 years ago

As a follow-up, it is always sad to see large volumes of community-driven content deleted especially when the motives are likely for selfish or nefarious purposes. Being somewhat familiar with the latest releases, Autodesk has been pushing their cloud services (Forge, or whatever they’re calling it this month) and AI. They are probably deleting the content after having fine-tuned an LLM on it and patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

VyseofArcadia4• 2 years ago

With that said, Revit does a lot of things well and there are no realistic alternatives.

Vectorworks? Archicad? I'm really only familiar with the former, full disclosure I used to work at Vectorworks, and we certainly considered ourselves a competitor to Revit.

Suppafly2• 2 years ago

maybe folks 'in the industry' have heard of those, but revit is the one people outside the industry have heard of.

tylerflick• 2 years ago

Oddly enough I remember Vectorworks and Archicad were (are) owned by the same company but were fiercely competitive.

Also, hello fellow former Nemetschek coworker .

sota_pop5• 2 years ago

Ok - definitely fair. While I HAVE heard of VW and ArchiCAD, (I suppose I might toss Bently into the mix as well) I don’t have extensive knowledge of these programs. Therefore, take my opinion as just that. However, from my understanding, those others focus more heavily on a CAD-like environment (SketchUp is another common one here) as opposed to “BIM” (where I would define BIM as essentially a database driven type of CAD with OOP bolted on). So in that sense they are certainly suitable for drafting and may compete for the same market share, but are fundamentally different. My use case was from the perspective from an ElecEngineering team operating within an AE firm in the US. I also understand ArchiCAD is more popular outside of the US.

sota_pop5• 2 years ago

Also I suppose this is part of the issue with “software alternatives” I find most architects by-and-large extremely _discerning_ people, composing an industry where nuance is king. In that sense if the software doesn’t do “exactly what I want, exactly how I want to do it” then it’s tossed aside as “not viable”. This is, in my view, another thing Revit does “well” - it is incredibly opinionated. For better or worse it means if you fight its intended workflow, achieving what you want is difficult or impossible.

On another note, care to share your experience at VW? I’m interested to hear anything you’re willing/able to share about your time there! I know someone on the NXOpen team who has spoken highly of that team/product.

_7acn• 2 years ago

Fun fact: In 2008, Autodesk acquired the competing and highly regarded Softimage, even though it already owned two 3D applications (3ds Max and Maya), only to shut it down six years later.

yacine_• 2 years ago

that's why i'm writing my own cad software, dingcad at dingcad.com

it will be free and open source

j45• 2 years ago

I wonder if this had anything to do with the increased LLM traffic to forums that I thought there had been a post about recently.

byyoung3• 2 years ago

Data is oil.

chaostheory• 2 years ago

This is likely due to legal reasons. I remember some child protection law where many forums decided to shut down rather than be legally and financially liable for breaking these laws.

altairprime• 2 years ago

When does the UK forum responsibility law take effect?

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

Many don’t realize that the internet is a series of tubes connected to computers that are in the process of breaking.

jfil• 2 years ago

Real hackers Memento Mori

LeoNatan25• 2 years ago

What a stupid and ridiculous thing to do in 2024. The budget overhead of storage, serving, traffic, bulletin-board software maintenance and moderation is negligible for a company like Autodesk.

This is likely the idea of some idiot middle-management clown that had to show "progress" and "impact" to their own management in order to get a performance bonus.

Octopuz• 2 years ago

We have both an AutoCAD subscription and a perpetual license for the 2010 version. We couldn't install the 2010 version anymore because they shut down their activation server.

Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly

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